Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come
to campus just as it has come to America’s towns and cities, its
places of work and its houses of worship, its public space and its
cyberspace. But the age of (in)security had announced its arrival on
campus with considerably less fanfare than elsewhere — until, that
is, the “less
lethal” weapons were unleashed in the fall of 2011.

Today, from the
City University of New York to the
University of California, students increasingly find themselves
on the frontlines, not of a war on terror, but of a war on
“radicalism” and “extremism.”
Just about everyone from college administrators and educators to law
enforcement personnel and corporate executives seems to have
enlisted in this war effort. Increasingly, American students are in
their sights.

In 2008, I laid out
seven steps the Bush administration had taken to create a
homeland security campus. Four years and a president later, Repress
U has come a long way. In the Obama years, it has taken seven more
steps to make the university safe for plutocracy. Here is a
step-by-step guide to how they did it.

1. Target Occupy

Had there been no
UC Davis, no
Lt. John Pike, no chemical weapons wielded against peacefully
protesting students, and no cameras to broadcast it all, Americans
might never have known just how far the homeland security campus has
come in its mission to police its students. In the old days, you
might have called in the
National
Guard. Nowadays, all you need is an FBI-trained, federally
funded and “less lethally” armed campus police department.

The mass pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis
was only the most public manifestation of a long-running campus
trend in which, for officers of the peace, the pacification of
student protest has become part of the job description. The weapons
of choice have sometimes been blunt instruments, such as the
extendable batons used to bludgeon the student body at
Berkeley,
Baruch and the
University of Puerto Rico. At other times, tactical officers
have turned to “less-lethal” munitions, like the CS gas, beanbag
rounds and pepper pellets fired into crowds at Occupy protests
across the University of California system this past winter.

Yet for everything we see of the homeland security
campus, there is a good deal more that we miss. Behind the riot
suits, the baton strikes, and the pepper-spray cannons stands a
sprawling infrastructure made possible by multimillion-dollar
federal grants, “memoranda
of understanding” and
“mutual aid” agreements among law enforcement agencies,
counter-terrorism training, an FBI-sponsored “Academic Alliance”
and 103 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (which provide “one-stop
shopping” for counterterrorism operations to more than 50 federal
and 600 state and local agencies).

“We have to go where terrorism takes us, so we
often have to go onto campuses,” FBI Special Agent Jennifer Gant
told Campus Safety Magazine in an interview last year. To that end,
campus administrators and campus police chiefs are now known to
coordinate their operations with Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) “special
advisors,” FBI “campus
liaison agents,” an FBI-led National Security Advisory Board and
a Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which instructs local law
enforcement in everything from “physical techniques” to “behavioral
science.” More than half of campus police forces already have “intelligence-sharing
agreements” with these and other government agencies in place.

2. Get a SWAT team

Since 2007, campus police forces have decisively
escalated their tactics, expanded their arsenals, and trained ever
more of their officers in SWAT-style paramilitary policing. Many
agencies acquire their arms directly from the Department of Defense
through a surplus weapons sales program known as “1033,”
which offers, among other things, “used
grenade launchers (for the deployment of less lethal weapons)…
for a significantly reduced cost.”

According to the most recent
federal data available, nine out of 10 campus agencies with
sworn police officers now deploy armed patrols authorized to use
deadly force. Nine in 10 also authorize the use of chemical
munitions, while one in five make regular use of Tasers. Last
August, an 18-year old student athlete died after being
tased at the University of Cincinnati.

Meanwhile, many campus police squads have been
educated in the art of war through regular special weapons training
sessions by “tactical officers’ associations” which run a kind of
SWAT university. In October, UC Berkeley played host to an “Urban
Shield” SWAT training exercise involving local and campus
agencies, the California National Guard, and special police forces
from Israel, Jordan, and Bahrain. And since 2010, West Texas A&M
has played host to
paramilitary training programs for police from Mexico.

In October, the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte got
its very own SWAT team, equipped with MP-15 rifles, M&P 40
sidearms, and Remington shotguns. “We have integrated SWAT officers
into the squads that serve our campus day and night,” boasted UNC
Charlotte Chief of Police Jeff Baker. The following month, in
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a SWAT team
staged an armed raid on an occupied building, pointing assault
rifles at the heads of activists, among them UNC students.

3. Spy on Muslims

The long arm of Repress U stretches far beyond the
bounds of any one campus or college town. As reported by the
Associated Press this winter, the
New York
City Police Department (NYPD) and its hitherto secret “Demographics
Unit” sent undercover operatives to spy on members of the Muslim
Students Association at
more than 20 universities in four states across the Northeast
beginning in 2006.

None of the organizations or persons of interest
were ever accused of any wrongdoing, but that didn’t stop NYPD
detectives from tracking Muslim students through a “Cyber
Intelligence Unit,” issuing weekly “MSA
Reports” on local chapters of the Muslim Students Association,
attending campus meetings and seminars, noting how many times
students prayed, or even serving as chaperones for what they
described as “militant
paintball trips.” The targeted institutions ran the gamut from
community colleges to Columbia and Yale.

According to the AP’s
investigation, the intelligence units in question worked closely
not only with agencies in other cities, but with an agent on the
payroll of the CIA. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, facing mounting
calls to resign, has issued a
spirited defense of the campus surveillance program, as has
Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “If terrorists aren’t limited by borders
and boundaries, we can’t be either,” Kelly said in a speech at
Fordham Law School.

The NYPD was hardly the only agency conducting
covert surveillance of Muslim students on campus. The FBI has been
engaging in such tactics for years. In 2007, UC Irvine student
Yasser Ahmed was
assaulted by FBI agents, who followed him as he was on his way
to a campus “free speech zone.” In 2010, Yasir Afifi, a student at
Mission College in Santa Clara, California, found a secret
GPS tracking device affixed to his car. A half-dozen agents
later knocked on his door to ask for it back.

4. Keep the undocumented out

Foreign students are followed closely by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through its
Student and
Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of 2011, the
agency was keeping tabs on 1.2 million students and their
dependents. Most recently, as part of a transition to the paperless
SEVIS II — which aims to “unify
records” — ICE has been linking student files to biometric and
employer data collected by DHS and other agencies.

“That information stays forever,” notes Louis
Farrell, director of the ICE program. “And every activity that’s
ever been associated with that person will come up. That’s
something that has been asked for by the national security
community… [and] the academic community.”

Then there are the more than 360,000 undocumented
students and high-school graduates who would qualify for permanent
resident status and college admission, were the
DREAM Act ever passed. It would grant conditional permanent
residency to undocumented students who were brought to the U.S. as
children. When such students started “coming out” as part of an “undocumented
and unafraid” campaign, many received DHS notices to appear for
removal proceedings. Take 24-year old
Uriel Alberto, of Lees-McRae College, who recently went on
hunger strike in North Carolina’s Wake County jail; he now faces
deportation (and separation from his U.S.-born son) for taking part
in a protest at the state capitol.

Since 2010, the homeland security campus has been
enlisted by the state of Arizona to enforce everything from
bans on ethnic studies programs to laws like
S.B. 1070, which makes it a crime to appear in public without
proof of legal residency and is considered a mandate for police to
detain anyone suspected of being undocumented. Many undocumented
students have turned down offers of admission to the
University of Arizona since the passage of the law, while others
have stopped attending class for fear of being detained and
deported.

5. Keep an eye on student spaces and
social media

While Muslim and undocumented students are
particular targets of surveillance, they are not alone. Electronic
surveillance has expanded beyond traditional closed-circuit TV
cameras to
next-generation technologies like IQeye HD megapixel cameras,
so-called edge devices (cameras that can do their own analytics),
and Perceptrak’s
video analytics software, which “analyzes video from security
cameras 24×7 for events of interest,” and which recently made its
debut at Johns Hopkins University and Mount Holyoke College.

At the same time, students’ social media accounts
have become a favorite destination for everyone from campus police
officers to analysts at the Department of Homeland Security.

In 2010, the DHS National Operations Center
established a
Media Monitoring Capability (MMC). According to an internal
agency document, MMC is tasked with “leveraging news stories, media
reports and postings on social media sites… for operationally
relevant data, information, analysis, and imagery.” The definition
of operationally relevant data includes “media reports that reflect
adversely on DHS and response activities,” “partisan or
agenda-driven sites,” and a final category ambiguously labeled
“research/studies, etc.”

With the Occupy movement coming to campus, even
university police departments have gotten in on the action.
According to a how-to guide called “Essential
Ingredients to Working with Campus Protests” by UC Santa Barbara
police chief Dustin Olson, the first step to take is to “monitor
social media sites continuously,” both for intelligence about the
“leadership and agenda” and “for any messages that speak to violent
or criminal behavior.”

6. Coopt the classroom and the laboratory

At a time when entire departments and disciplines
are facing the chopping block at America’s universities, the
Department of Homeland Security has proven to be the best-funded
department of all. Homeland security studies has become a
major growth sector in higher education and now has
more than 340 certificate- and degree-granting programs. Many
colleges have joined the
Homeland Security
and Defense Education Consortium, a spinoff of the U.S. Northern
Command (the Department of Defense’s “homeland
defense” division), which offers a model curriculum to its
members.

This emerging discipline has been directed and
funded to the tune of
$4 billion over the last five years by DHS. The goal, according
to Dr. Tara O’Toole, DHS Undersecretary of Science & Technology, is
to “leverag[e] the investment and expertise of academia… to meet the
needs of the department.” Additional funding is being made
available from the Pentagon through its blue-skies research arm, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the “intelligence
community” through its analogous Intelligence Advanced Research
Projects Activity.

At the core of the homeland security-university
partnership are DHS’s 12
centers of excellence. (A number that has
doubled since I first reported on the initiative in 2008.) The
DHS
Office of University Programs advertises the centers of
excellence as an “extended consortium of hundreds of universities”
which work together “to develop customer-driven research solutions”
and “to provide essential training to the next generation of
homeland security experts.”

But what kind of research is being carried out at
these centers of excellence, with the support of tens of millions of
taxpayer dollars each year? Among the 41 “knowledge
products” currently in use by DHS or being evaluated in pilot
studies, we find an “extremist crime database,” a “Minorities at
Risk for Organizational Behavior” dataset, analytics for aerial
surveillance systems along the border, and social media monitoring
technologies. Other
research focuses include biometrics, “suspicious behavior
detection,” and “violent radicalization.”

7. Privatize, subsidize and capitalize

Repress U has not only proven a boon to hundreds
of cash-starved universities, but also to big corporations as higher
education morphs into hired education. While a majority of
the $184 billion in homeland security funding in 2011 came from
government agencies like DHS and the Pentagon, private sector
funding is expected to make up an
increasing share of the total in the coming years, according to
the
Homeland Security Research Corporation, a consulting firm
serving the homeland security industry.

Each DHS Center of Excellence has been founded on
private-public partnerships, corporate co-sponsorships, and the
leadership of “industry
advisory boards” which give big business a direct stake and say
in its operations. Corporate giants allied with DHS Centers of
Excellence include:

What’s more, universities have struck
multimillion-dollar deals with multinational
private security firms like Securitas, deploying unsworn,
underpaid, often untrained “protection officers” on campus as “extra
eyes and ears.” The University of Wisconsin-Madison, in one
report, boasts that police and private partners have been
“seamlessly integrated.”

Elsewhere, even students have gotten into the
business of security. The private intelligence firm STRATFOR, for
example, recently
partnered with the University of Texas to use its students to
“essentially parallel the work of… outside consultants” but on
campus, offering information on activist groups like the
Yes Men.

Step by step, at school after school, the homeland
security campus has executed a silent coup in the decade since
September 11th. The university, thus usurped, has increasingly
become an instrument not of higher learning, but of intelligence
gathering and paramilitary training, of profit-taking on behalf of
America’s
increasingly embattled “1 percent.”

Yet the next generation may be otherwise
occupied. Since September 2011, a new
student
movement has swept across the country, making itself felt most
recently on
March 1st with a national day of action to defend the right to
education. This Occupy-inspired wave of on-campus activism is making
visible what was once invisible, calling into question what was once
beyond question, and counteracting the logic of Repress U with the
logic of nonviolence and education for democracy.

For many, the rise of the homeland security campus
has provoked some basic questions about the aims and principles of a
higher education: Whom does the university serve? Whom does it
protect? Who is to speak? Who is to be silenced? To whom does the
future belong?

The guardians of Repress U are uninterested in
such inquiry. Instead, they cock their weapons. They lock the
gates. And they prepare to take the next step.